How many of you live in communities where community meetings are boring affairs punctuated by outrage? How many of you feel like influencing your local government means showing up en masse with a pettion or an organized campaign to get them to make a small change? How many of you are just plain disillusioned with your local government and have given up trying to help them involve citizens in decision making?
And how many of you are leaders that are frustrated by citizens who just yell at you all the time? How many of you don’t actually know what you are doing, but could never admit that in public? How many of you have tried to involve the community once, failed and vowed never to do it again? How many of you have strategic communications strategies (public or secret) for dealing with your own citizens?
This is what it has come to in many places. In my local community, not unlike many others across Canada, our local Council was elected on a tide of resentment that was stoked against the previous Council. For most of the previous Council’s term, a group of citizens mounted a campaign of smear and slander, including starting a newspaper funded by developers devoted to criticizing almost every Council initiative and culminating in an election campaign where four of the sitting members of Council were branded “The Gang of Four.” And even subsequent to the election 18 months ago, there has been an ongoing litany of blame against the old Council and people considered to be nsupportive of the old Council (and I count myself as one of them). The result is, on our local island, there is a real sense of cynicism. The new Council has not created any new initiatives with respect to involving citizens, and has, if my records are straight, only one “town hall” meeting. We have been short on dialogue and deliberation and if there are any decisions being made at all, they are being made without the invitation of the community. It feels sad, not because somehow the old Council was better than this one, but because our community can be so much more interesting and engaged.
Over the years citizens on Bowen have self-organized not just is lobby groups to advocate for particular policy decisions, but to actually build things that local governments should otherwise be doing. A group of citizens from across the political spectrum participated in a unique group called Bowen island Ourselves, which sought to undertake these kinds of initiatives to compliment local government services and functions. As a result, we did things like develop a crowdsourced road status tool, hosted a parallel process of Open Space dialogues alongside the formal consultation process for our official community planning process, sponsored deliberation meetings on issues such as local agriculture and the proposal to create a national park on Bowen Island, organize and implement BowenLIFT as an alternative transportation system. Lots of stuff.
But when the well becomes poisoned and citizens and elected officials begin just screaming at each other, fear takes over and stuff like that shuts down. We are in a period like that right now on Bowen, and the result is that a number of decisions are being made that have a significant impact on the future of our island, especially with respect to our village centre, without having any creative public dialogue. There is simply no place for the public to be a part of co-creating the future. We will get open houses on the plans that Council designs with a few advisors.
But it doesn’t have to be this way. There are thousands of tools out there that can help people do interesting and creative community engagement. This list of decision making tools from the Orton Family Foundation came through my inbox today. What is required to choose these tools?
Well first, a local government must be brave enough to stand in front of it’s citizens and ask for help. Assuming that you have the answers to complex questions is unwise. Better to be learners in office than heros. Second, a local government has to trust it’s citizens and create a climate where ideas can be discussed respectfully. Sure there are always going to be people wanting to take shots at you (especially if you played that way before you were in office) but as local leaders, there is an art to opening space where citizens can be in dialogue rather than debate. Third, local governments have to be serious about using what they learn and being clear an transparent about why they are choosing some ideas over others. Lastly it helps if local government leaders actually relish their jobs and see their community members, even the ones they disagree with as interesting and worthwhile neighbours. I have heard many local elected officials over the years express outright contempt for their citizens (although rarely does it happen while the official is sitting in office)
If you get some of this right, things can open up. If that’s what you want. But it takes leadership, and not just the kind that massages agendas and works behind the scenes. It requires leaders to stand up in front of their citizens and declare their willingness to make a new start and to leverage the best of their community’s assets. It requires leaders to trust their citizens and to relish working with them to create community initiatives and services that are loved and enjoyed by all.
I’d love to hear stories of local governments that changed their tune midstream to become open and excited about inclusive and participatory decision making processes. It would inspire me to hope that maybe something like that is possible where I live.
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It’s an old saw with me, but Dave Snowdon puts it very nicely and succinctly:
Numbers are good, but they are never the whole picture. Its easy to focus on them, they give the comfort of apparent objectivity and used to support human judgement they have high utility. The problem is when they replace judgement rather than supporting it. Of course in the ordered aspects of any enterprise statistics and numbers can do a lot of the work for you, but in a complex situation they can be dangerous. Applied to ordered aspects (boundary conditions, probes and the like) they have utility, but for the system as a whole they are more problematic.
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All the best stuff I have learned about mentoring has been in the context of traditional culture, whether with indigenous Elders from Canada or in the traditional Irish music community. Traditional Irish music is played and kept alive in a structure called a “sessiun.” There is a repertoire of thousands of tunes, but most musicians who have played for a while will have a hundred or more in common, and that can easily make for a long evening of playing together. Sessiuns are hosted by the most experienced musicians (traditionally a Fir a Ti, or Ban a Ti; the man or woman of the house). These guys are responsible for inviting people in, inviting tunes, keeping a tempo that everyone can play with, resolving any conflicts”in short they are the hosts.
But the best ones are also the teachers and the mentors and they dispense wisdom, lessons, encouragement and direction during and between tune sets. If you are smart and you are learning you try to sit near them in the circle to pick up teachings.
With Irish music, the best mentors I ever had always did a few things well:
- They were better musicians themselves than I could ever imagine myself to be
- They created space for me to play with them and gave me increasingly more responsibility from starting tune sets to perhaps playing a solo air to eventually sitting in for them if they couldn’t make it out to host a sessiun. But they didn’t invite me to lead the session when I was just beginning.
- When they knew I had a set of tunes down they invited me to lead that set. If I had a slow air they knew I could play, they would invite me to play a solo.
- They pointed out things that I could DO, rather than things not to do, and if they played flute (my instrument) they showed me on their instrument what they meant. There was never any abstract conversations about the music or technique. If I was doing something wrong, they would suggest an alternative (indigenous Elders, and especially Anichinaabe elders are very good at this. There is something peculiar to traditional Anishinaabe culture that makes it very hard for an Elder to tell you NOT to do something. They always point to doing something else.)
- They protected me from “hot shots” who like to show off by playing tunes too fast for you to play with them.
- And when I was ready I got invited into more and more responsibility with the sessions and was eventually invited to perform with them. The day of becoming a colleague is a big deal, and I still feel that I can’t hold a candle to my teachers, even though they insist that we have moved into a co-mentoring relationship.
What was beautiful about all that was that, even when i became colleagues with my mentors I never lost the sense of gratitude of being able to play with them. Even today 20 years later, it is a treat for me to play with those who taught me.
Mentoring in the art of hosting, of leadership of working with groups is the same. It is a traditional practice.
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Very few of us have our hands on the real levers of power. We lack the money and influence to write policy, create tax codes, move resources around or start and stop wars. Most of us spend almost all of our time going along with the macro trends of the world. We might hate the implications of a fossil fuel economy, but everything we do is firmly embedded within it. We might despise colonization, but we know that we are alos guilty of it in many small ways,
The reason challenges like that are difficult to resolve is that we are embedded within them. We are a part of them and the problem is not like something outside of ourselves that we apply force to. Instead it is like a virus or a mycellium, extending it’s tendrils deep into our lives. We are far more the product of the problems we wish to solve than we are the solutions we long to develop.
Social change is littered with ideas like “taking things to scale” which implies that if you just work hard enough, the things you will do will become popular and viral and will take over the world. We can have a sustainable future if “we just practice simple things and then take them to scale.” The problem with this reasoning is that the field in which we are embedded, that which enables us to practice small changes is heavily immune to change. Our economy, our energy systems, our governments are designed to be incredibly stable. They can withstand all kinds of threats and massive changes, This is a GOOD THING. I would hate to have the energy system that powers my life to be fickle enough to be transformed by every good idea that comes along about sustainable power generation. So that is the irony. In the western world, the stability that we rely on to be able to “make change” is exactly that which we desire to change.
We are embedded in the system. We ARE the system. That which we desire to change is US. You want a peaceful world, because you are not a fully peaceful person – violence has seeped into your life, and you understand the implications of it. This is also a GOOD THING. Because, as my friend Adam Kahane keeps quoting from time to time “if you are not a part of the problem, you cannot be part of the solution.” Real change in stable societies like Canada comes only from catastrophic failure. That may be on our horizon, but I call you a liar if it’s something you desire. It will not be pretty. Living on the west coast of Canada, I sometimes think about it because a massive earthquake will strike here – possibly in my lifetime – and it will change everything instantly and massively and forever. So, while climate change and economic collapse are probabilities, earthquakes are certainties.
So let’s forget about prototyping new things and “taking them to scale.” But let’s not forget about prototyping new things. Because one of the big lessons from the living systems world view is that change happens in an evolutionary way. It happens deep within the system and it requires two resources we all have – creativity and time. It does not require hope. Living systems do not hope. They just change.
Years ago I was inspired by Michael Dowd’s ideas captured in “Thank God for Evolution” in which he talks about mutations as the vehicle of change in evolving systems. Of course this is a widespread thought, but it was quite liberating to me when I first discovered it because it compels us to use our own creativity to make change. Practicing something different, as some small level, is not a useless endeavour. There is no way to know what will happen when you mutate the system. And so that is a reason for practicing. That is why I love Occupy and #IdleNoMore and other social gathering practices. They are creative mutations of the status quo. And they are undertaken without any expectation of massive change. Instead they seed little openings, the vast majority of which don’t go anywhere. In an evolutionary system, mutations may introduce new levels of adaptability, but they might alos kill off the organism. But to survive and evolve, an organism needs to mutate. Remaining the same is also suicidal, because everything else is mutating and changing, and you will lose your fitness if you don’t also change.
So the second resource we all have is time. if you are beholden to making change along a strategic critical pathway, especially in a complex living system, you will suffer terrible delusions. Very few of us have that kind of time. The kind of time we do have is the time to let whatever we do work or fail. To orient yourself to this kind of time, you need to practice something with no expectation of it’s success. The moment you cling to a desired result is the moment suffering creeps into your work, and the moment you begin to lose resilience. Adaptability is reliant on creative imaginations working resourcefully.
So changing from within has something to do with all of this. Watching #IdleNoMore is to witness a celebratory mutation in the system of colonization. It is impossible to say if it will have the desired results that people project upon it. But of course it will “work.” We need to sit and watch it work as a mutation in a living system. And the bonus is that we get to round dance while we do it!
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Working with groups is not easy. This is Ian McGeechan, manager of the British and Irish Lions before a dead rubber test.
My friend Kathy Jourdain was quoted yesterday as saying “our power comes from our vulnerability.” This video reminds me of how that feels some days.