I think there is probably nothing new under the sun. Engagement work has been tried, refined and improved all over the world in the last couple of decades that I wonder if there is anything new we can learn? It does seem to fall into “authentic engagement” and “engagement washing” – if I can coin a couple of phrases. But I haven’t seen radically new thinking or practice for a while.
What we are getting instead is some terrific collections of tools, handbooks and harvests of processes. This .pdf of a Handbook for Civic Engagement prepared for a community process in the United States is an excellent example of the kind of harvesting that is useful. It sums up lessons learned from engagement process, proceeds from practice to inform theory and provides some useful invitations for practice and application. This is an artifact which has emerged out of the space of engagement “praxis” – the gap between theory and practice. I’m interested in tis inquiry at the moment, and stumbling across things like this in my quest to understand what is useful in harvesting from initiatives that sustain the capacity and learning begun in real engagement.
“Engagement washing” initiatives don’t usually leave these kinds of documents in the places where the engagement took place. It should be a hall mark of good practice that process learnings are shared and tools are developed as well as results documented.
This afternoon, Toke Moeller and I are hosting a little session on Art of Hosting basics at a gathering for emerging indigenous leaders. We decided this afternoon to bring real design challenges into the room and we improvised this simple, simple design checklist. In some ways this is the simplest form of the chaordic stepping stones. Here’s how it works.
In my experience good participatory meetings result from good design and preparation. In this diagram the meeting itself is the last thing we design. First we design the bookends: Purpose on the one hand and harvest/action on the other hand. Once we know that, then we can develop an invitation and finally choose processes that bridge the two sides. The meeting itself therefore become the vehicle by which a group of people reach a harvest and wise action ground in a purpose and a deep need.
Purpose
What is the big purpose that we are trying to fulfill?
A meeting that has too small a purpose has no life in it. It just seems to be a mundane thing done for it’s own sake. To design creatively, keep purpose at the centre and ensure that everything you do is aligned with that.
Harvest
What do you want to harvest?
– in our hands ( tangible)?
– in our hearts ( intangible)?
Not every meeting needs to have a report and an action plan, but every meeting does have a harvest. This question is the strategic conversation that helps us focus our time together. We need to think about the shape of the harvest we can hold in our hands (reports, photos, videos, sculptures…) and those we hold in our hearts (togetherness, team spirit, clarity, passion…).
Wise action
How will we make action happen?
– who will help us tune in to the reality of the situation?
How will you keep people together?
It is easy to make a list of to do’s at the end of a meeting and feel like something has been accomplished, but that is a naive approach to change. If action is required get really clear about who needs to be involved to make it happen. Think about who enables action or who can stop it and what resources are required. And if the resources aren’t available or accessible, then make a different action plan.
Also, never forget to make a plan for how people will stay together. If sustainability is important, then strong relationships are important. Building a process that doesn’t enhance relationships does not contribute to sustainability.
Invitation –
What is the inspiring question that will bring people together?
How will we invite people so they know they are needed?
Good participatory gatherings depend on the quality of the invitation. A lazy invitation attracts confused participants. A clear and powerful invitation accompanied by a powerful personal invitation gets participants who are ready and eager for the work. Invitation is a lot of work. It SHOULD be a lot of work. A good invitation process makes the meeting easy.
Meeting
What will you do to make the meeting creative and powerful?
Once we know all of this we can choose a meeting process that helps move from purpose to wise action. We can use pre-existing processes like Open Space or World Cafe or design new ones particular to our needs. Today we are using the group pattern language card deck to inspire creative thinking about meeting design.
If we really want to create a new normal, we shouldn’t settle any longer for boring meetings. If the processes we are using aren’t serving us, or helping us crack the deepest questions that confound us, then we should stop using them and start being more creative and powerful.
This little tool has the feeling of a portable, quick and dirty design checklist, that allows core teams and process designers to get working pretty quickly. Use it and let me know what you learn.
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.
Last night in Vancouver listening to Le Vent du Nord, a terrific traditional band from Quebec. They put on one of the best live shows I have seen in a long time with outstanding musicianship combined with incredible energy. Listening to them and watching people dancing I had a deep experience of why we humans need art. It brings us into a joyful relationship which each other that we seem built to need – a kind of belonging that transcends each of our individual reservations, a sort of shared ecstasy. The cynic might say that such an attitude is decadent in a world of suffering, but I think it is clear that without these experiences of ourselves as joyful collectives, the serious work of living in our time is compromised by our own personal and private fears.
Lately I have been working with mainline Protestant churches and Christian communities a lot and I have appreciated being able to bring deep cultural and spiritual stories to our work together. The times they are all in are times n which the traditional forms of Church are dying and the new forms havent yet arrived. And while the leaders i have been with welcome the shift, many congregations are in grieving about the loss of an old way of doing things,
Last weekend in Atlanta, the group I was with picked the story of Ezekiel in the valley of dry bones to explore together. In that story, Ezekiel, who is a shaman, is carried into the spirit world where is comes across a valley of bones. Turns out that these are the bones of an army and God says to him “can these bones live?” Ezekiel does what all good shamans do when confronted with the awesome power of mystery and gives up any pretense of knowing the outcome. So together, God gives Ezekiel instructions and wakes up an army.
The armies of the old testament stories have always troubled me, because they are forever slaughtering and committing genocide because of God’s commands. But read as an allegory, suddenly this stuff becomes very powerful. For example, most spiritual paths have you confronting archetypal enemies on your pathway, such as greed or anger or the ego. To achieve enlightenment, to get to the promised land, means overcoming these enemies. And an army then seen in this context is a group of people that are greater than any one person’s fear.
So here is Ezekiel in the valley into which an army has been led and slaughtered, and he is being engaged in the work of waking up an army. Why? Well, once they have been woken up, God tells Ezekiel that they can go home. Home is the promised land, a place of freedom and kindness and relaxation and fearlessness. Coming home to oneself, finding home as a community.
To illustrate, another story I heard yesterday. One of the congregations I have been working with has been waking up to themselves in the work we have been doing together. When a group of people wakes up like that one has, all the dust and cobwebs come off them, and all of their beauty and warts are revealed. While we have designed and implemented many little projects in the Church, we have also awoken a little power struggle over a small but important issue. Typical of these kinds of issues, a small group has dug its heels in and doesn’t see its impact or connection to the larger community. Last night they all met and with some deliberate hosting, quickly discovered a common consensus on moving forward, one which I am led to believe takes each person outside of themselves and into a common centre of action.
In short, they had a different experience of themselves and each other, an experience that awakens the centre that Le Vent du Nord awakened last night. It is an experience that Christians can understand fully from their traditional teachings – Jesus constantly talks about love at the centre of the work of the world, and that community is the experience we are after. In the best forms of Christianity – including the form in which I was brought up! – the spiritual path is one of discovering kindness and a shared centre. From that place, transformation of community, family, organizations, and the world can be experienced and pursued. The hard work of dealing with power is made more human by acting from love and the beautiful work of cultivating relationship is put us to use by transforming power.
Last week I took an afternoon in Atlanta and went to visit Martin Luther King Jr’s Church where love and power awoke together in what King called “beloved community.”. These past months and years, I realize that this is what I am working for everywhere – in First Nations, organizations, communities, companies, churches and elsewhere. The beloved community draws us back home to our own humble humanity. It tempers the world’s harsh edges and it enables powerful structures to create beautiful outcomes.
And that experience is worth waking up for. Even an army.
My friend Tom Atlee has been a remarkable documented of the lessons from the #Occupy movement. Since I was at Wall Street two months ago I have continued to be astonished at the creativity, leadership and communication styles emerging from the movement.
Today though, Tom has a long post on perhaps the most astonishing event yet. Following the well publicized pepper spraying of students at UC Davis, a remarkable non-violent action took place to de-escalate the situation. Take the time to read the whole post and watch the full video. It is moving, inspiring and possible ground breaking in the way police and protestors can be invited to work together to keep peace. It is the essence of real time chaotic action.