One of the most useful books of the past five years in terms of the work I do is Peter Block’s Community: The Structure of Belonging. In it he aggregates the wisdom of those of us who have been practicing participatory process for the last 30 years in North America. The essence of the work is that social fabric, created through conversations that produce relationships, is the foundation for improvement in communities and the fundamental pre-requisite for effective and sustainable problem solving.
This set of videos is a great introduction to Peter’s work. View parts one, two and three.
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From the Applied Improv Network ning, here is a great set of Improv Games for Larger Groups. For use in conferences, large groups settings, school assemblies, church services, riots and demos, sporting events, concerts, Apple store lineups, picket lines and anywhere else a few dozen people or more are gathered.
I especially like this line from Paul Levy in the discussion “There are no large groups, just tiny facilitators!”
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Flipcharts. Let me count the ways that we are tyrannized by them:
1. Power accretes around a flipchart. The next time you are in a meeting, see if you can tell where the front of the room is. It’s likely that, even if you are in a circle, the “front” will be where the flipchart is. As I wrote this I am in an Open Space meeting where people are gathered around flipcharts, and rather than organize in tight circles, several groups are arranged in semi circles facing one person holding a marker and writing on the flipchart. This defeats the purpose of a conversation in which every voice is equal. Who controls the flipchart, controls the story. Be very careful about having an easel stand in the room. People are easily silenced and controlled by them at a deep unconscious level.
2. We have to write everything down. Having a flip chart in a meeting seems to demand that everything spoken gets written down for all to see. This does not facilitate a good flow in a conversation, and it is rarely a useful harvest of a discussion. In free conversations, not everything is useful, not everything is weighted the same, not everything matters.
3. Flipcharts are linear beasts. Unless you use a flipchart creatively, such as by mind mapping or the way Jim Rough does it in Dynamic Facilitation, flipcharts are useless linear beasts. Most people simply write lists of points on them, in sequential order and when the page is full, they flip it over and keep writing. Wisdom disappears over the fold, every point is given equal weight and conversations tend to proceed in linear ways rather than emergent ways.
4. Renting easel stands is a scam. Hotels charge exorbitant rates to rent a flipchart stand. It is not un common for these things to go for $50 a day and at one hotel I worked at, the Sheraton in Atlanta, they charged $170 for a flipchart stand with half a pad of news print paper on it. NEVER rent them. (Look at this scam!)
5. Post it flipchart pads are a bigger scam. If you use flipcharts in any kind of creative way you will have already discovered that the overpriced post-it flipcharts are incredibly confining. You can only hang them one way, it is difficult to cut them into smaller pieces, it is awkward to roll up notes at the end of a meeting because everything sticks to everything else. Give me a pad of 75 sheets of large white paper, and I’m happy. I can cut them into quarters for Open Space topics, or tape them on a wall together to make large murals, or cover cafe tables with them. Seventy-seven dollars for a pad is plain wrong.
So what is a GOOD way to use flipcharts and easels?
1. Put the paper in the middle. In small meetings, say in a board room, take the paper off the easel stand and put it flat on the table. If possible, allow everyone access to the paper so that multiple notes can be taken. Putting the harvest tool in the middle of the table allows everything we are doing to be directed towards the centre. This is the basis of the way we harvest in World Cafe and it is brilliant. It democratizes the harvesting tools in a powerful way. Your conversations WILL be different.
2. Make a mind map. Get used to taking notes in a non-linear way. Mind maps are much better ways to capture the essence of a conversation because the group can see linkages and watch the emerging whole of the conversation.
3. Use easels to make signs. Easels are useful for static signs pointing out times and places, instructions and so on. The moment they become the focus of attention, you will notice that they play on different levels. The note taker is above the group, and the notes are elevated. In improv we call this a status game. So neutralize the status. Use easels for signs.
4. See what you can do with tape, scissors and paper. Tape helps you make flipchart pads bigger by taping several sheets together. Scissors help you make flipchart pads smaller. In these three tools you have everything you need to scale your work.
5. Learn how to do graphic recording. The Grove teaches this skill. And what I love the best about the graphic recorders I work with is how they quietly listen and create harvests without being a dominating presence in a room. even though the murals they create are huge, their presence is small as they are working, allowing groups to focus on conversation and listening rather than “speaking to the record.” Also, learning to use basic graphic recording tools such as icons, diagrams and pictures helps make your own notes less linear, more meaningful and more useful in general for a group.
So, banish the easel, liberate the pads, be creative, be aware of power. Have fun.
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Running an Art of Hosting workshop this week for employees of the City of Edmonton. We are about 30 people all together looking at the art of hosting participatory process, convening and leading in complex environments where certainty is an artifact of the past.
Naturally because these people work for a municipal government, the conversations we are having tend to be about systems. We are working at the level of what it takes a system to shift itself as well as what it takes of an individual to lead when the answers are unclear.
For me, lots of good insights are coming up. A few that cracked in a cafe conversation this morning included these three:
- The fundamental question facing governments is not why or what or who, but HOW. How can we deliver services differently? How do we change to include more public voice in our work without losing our mandate? How do we cope with the scale of change, chaos, interconnection and complexity that is upon us? These questions are powerful because they invite a fundamental shift in how things are done – the same question is being asked of the Aboriginal child welfare system at the moment in British Columbia, which is looking to create a new system from the ground up. Shifting foundations requires the convening of diversity and integrating diverse worldviews and ideas.
- New systems cannot be born with old systems without power struggle. As old ways of dong things die, new ways of doing things arise to take their place. But there isn’t a linear progression between the death of one system and the birth of the new: the new arises within the old. Transformation happens when the new system uses the old to get things done and then stands up to hold work when the old system dies. While old systems are dying, they cling to the outdated ways of doing things, and as long as old systems continue to control the resources and positions of power and privilege, transformation takes place within a struggle between the new and the old. Ignoring power is naive.
- A fundamental leadership capacity is the ability to connect people. This is especially true of people who long for something new but who are disconnected and working alone in the ambiguity and messy confusion of not knowing the answer.
Its just clear to me now that holding a new conversation in a different way with the same people is not itself enough for transformation to occur. That alone is not innovation. The answers to our most perplexing problems come from levels of knowing that are outside of our current level. The answers for a city may come from global voices or may come from the voices of families. Our work in the child welfare system was about bringing the wisdom of how families traditionally organized to create a new framework for child welfare policy and practice, and that work continues. Without a strategic framework for action, for transforming process itself, mere reorganization is not enough.
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I recently wrote a white paper for a First Nations organization on participatory community engagement. The paper outlines several models, principles and processes that I am mcurrently working with as I help groups design and implement longer term community engagement processes.
Here is the most recent version of the paper for your reading, in .pdf format. The paper talks about mental models and comes from a perspective of decolonization. I’d love to have your thoughts in the comments so I can refine it further.