The truth, from a site that excels in getting it right: indexed. Props to Dave Snowdon for the link
Several people on the National Coalition for Dialogue and Deliberation list have been noticing the line taken by US Presidential candidates Barack Obama and Hilary Clinton regarding engaging in dialogue with Americans. Both candidates have launched their campaings with a promise to engage Americans in conversations to learn more about what’s on the collective mind.
Obama:
For the next several weeks, I am going to talk with people from around the country, listening and learning more about the challenges we face as a nation, the opportunities that lie before us, and the role that a presidential campaign might play in bringing our country together. And on February 10th, at the end of these decisions and in my home state of Illinois, I’ll share my plans with my friends, neighbors and fellow Americans
No matter where you live, no matter what your political views, I want you to be a part of this important conversation right at the start. So to begin, I’m going to spend the next several days answering your questions in a series of live video web discussions. Starting Monday, January 22, at 7 p.m. EST for three nights in a row, I’ll sit down to answer your questions about how we can work together for a better future. And you can participate live at my website. Sign up to join the conversation here.
I have had experience with the political process as a policy maker, citizen engagement consultant, lobbyist and within party structures here in Canada.
I generally give very little stock to politicians that talk about dialogue in the context of a political campaign. That isn’t to say that some parties and politicians don’t genuinely believe in the dialogue process. It’s just that in the context of a a campaign there is too much at stake to actually have a real dialogue with the public.
Before a politican launches a campaign, the dialogue is is mostly over. It has been held with people in the party, with the supporters of the candidate and those in the structures of power that need the confidence to endorse this one person as representative of their views and interests. No one would put millions of dollars into a political campaign that was going to find its agenda through dialogue with citizens.
Having said that, I have been remarkably surprised over the years at how much incredibly deep dialogic deliberation actually goes on behind the scenes in various party circles and in the corridors of power. While some of this is simply naked influence, political parties can sometimes be interesting crucibles for ideas to tackle the biggest issues facing a country.
And certainly I have had many, many experiences where polticians, once elected, engage in deeper dialogue with citizens. Once the election is won, the ones who truly care about dialogue are free to attend and engage in the Open Space meeting, the talking circles, World Cafe’s, and other intensive dialogues with citizens where the outcome is unknown and what is needed is openness and willingness to explore ideas, away from preconceived notions and ideologies. I have worked with provincial premiers, federal and provincial cabinet ministers, members of the opposition, municipal and regional leaders as well using all of these tools and processes, and the politcians have nearly always made the point that they have learned something in the process of engaging in dialogue.
I think this must be true in the States as well, at the more local levels of governance. It would surprise and delight me to see a president engage so vulnerably though, especially with all that is invested in the outcomes of a presidency. Instead what tends to happen is that they loosen the tie, grab the hand held mic and stand in a town hall where they engage in some friendly and spirited cross-examination with public and don’t really learn anything at all. And this seems peculiar to America, in which the leader doesn’t have the same polticial accountability that our prime ministers have by having to face questions in Parliament. In that context, where a president can spend eight years as a hermit, a town hall is a startling thing to see. But it’s not dialogue as we all know, and it conforms to the same safe approach to citizen engagement that protects the political investmnts in the holder of high office.
I think the proof of the tasting for these leadership hopefuls will be first of all in how they respond to the grassroots dialogues that do emerge around their compaigns, a tack taken by Howard Dean in 2000. And then it will be interesting to see what happens when and if they actually get elected, but it would surprise me if even Barack Obama turned to conversations with Americans to set policy in the same way with the same weight that he responded to conversations with the power structures that set tha American agenda regardless of who is in office – large multinational commercial interests, global poltical alliances, economic markets and domestic advisors and strategists.
[tags]Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton, politics[/tags]
Picture a field in which someone has planted wheat.
We imagine the harvest from that field to look lkike a farmer using equipment to cut down the wheat, thresh it, and seperate the seeds from the stalks.
Now imagine a geologist a biologist and a painter harvesting from the same field. The geologist picks through the rocks and soil gathering data about the land itself. The biologist might collect insects and worms, bits of plants and organic matter. The painter sees the patterns in the landscape and chooses a pallete and a perspective for work of art.
They all harvest differently from the field, and the results of their work go to different places and are put to different uses. But they all have a few things in common; they have a purpose for being in the field and a set of questions about that purpose, they have a pre-determined place to use the results of the harvest, and they have specific tools to use in doing their work.
What’s useful to note is that, despite the field being the same, the tools and results are specific to the purpose and the inquiry.
It is like this when we meet. There is much we can do, but a well thought through inquiry helps us to sift all that we might learn in the meeting to that which serves our purpose. When we can design questions that open up our curiosity, think through how we might use the results of our work and use the tools appropriate to the task, we can go deeper into our tasks and acheive emergent, innovative and better quality results.
So just try this for the next meeting you are a part of. Give some time before hand to create a little inquiry: “What am I curious about in this meeting?” Think in advance how the results of that inquiry will help you work better, and decide on at least one way in which you will use what you have learned. See if that doesn’t create just a little more engagement and createa little more momentum for the results.
Photo by Hector
In the Netherlands, a groupd of kids has challenged a government minister to see who can reduce their power consumption the most:
Being 14 is no obstacle to helping the planet, judging by the example of a group of Dutch school kids fired up by an idea as bright as an energy-saving light bulb.
The schoolchildren from Almere taking part in The Bet
Thanks indirectly to their efforts, vehicles at the Netherlands’ environment ministry will be running on natural gas by the spring of 2007.
The teenagers in Almere, a futuristic new town near Amsterdam, had called on the environment minister to outdo them personally in ways to save energy.
Over four weeks, and under the arbitration of environmental organisation Friends of the Earth, the two sides vied to come up with ideas for meeting the European Union’s minimum Kyoto goal of 8% savings.
Children from Helen Parkhurst School, which already has its own wind turbines, pursued The Bet at home, in class and in local businesses.
If they lost, the kids – average age 14 – would have to pull State Secretary Pieter van Geel around The Hague for a day in a rickshaw.
And guess who won? The kids reduced their energy consumption by 33% beating the minister’s 20% reduction.
This is an outstanding idea. I wonder what other challenges kids could think of to put in front of politicians? Pure passion bounded by responsibility.
In the last couple of weeks I have been in deep and important conversations about the work of facilitating change in the world. I am just back from another Art of Hosting gathering, this time in Boulder, Colorado and, among the many many things that were on my mind there, the subject of talk and action came up.
This was especially a good time to have this conversation as this particular Art of Hosting brought together many deep practitioners of both the Art of Hosting approach to facilitating change and the U-process approach to action and systemic change. One of the conversations I had related to solving really tough problems and I had a deep insight in that discussion.
I think first of all that there is a false dichotomy between talk and action. To be more precise I should say that there is a symbiotic relationship between talk and action. We can act any way we choose, and that is just fine, but when we want to take action that is wise, we need to be in conversation with others. We may also be in conversation with context as well, which looks like a literature review, a market study, an environmental scan and so on. Regardless, wisdom follows from being with the insights of others. Wise action is what we do after we have talked well together.
The question now is, what role does wise action have in solving tough problems? It seems to me that every system that responds to something has an action system within it. The action system is what the system or community uses to move on any particular need. And so, in Canada we have a legal system that creates action to resolve disputes between parties. We have a food system that delivers food to our stores. We have a health care system to care for us when we are sick. Within these three systems, there is a discrete action system and there is a lot of conversation. In the legal system conversation and action are raised to high and almost ritualistic arts. The formal conversation of a courtroom is so far beyond regular conversation that one actually has to hire a specialist to engage in it. And judgements, court orders and sentences are the mechanisms by which change takes place. Various bodies enforce these judgements so that there is accountability in the system.
Similarly, the food system and the health care system have conversational forums, meetings and so on in which wisdom and strategy is discerned, and there are trucks and doctors to do the work.
The problem is that neither of these three systems contains an action system that can reduce crime, prevent malnutrition or lower patient wait times. In other words thare are problems that are too big for the curent action system of any given community, society, or world. These problems become known as “wicked problems” or intractable problems, and they are often met with much despair.
When we are faced with these problems, we need to ask ourselves what to do. Do we use the existing systems, even in novel recombination, to try to tackle the biggest problems? Or perhaps is the biggest problem the capacity of the action system itself?
This is an intriguing idea to me. This is what I jotted down this morning in an email to some of my mates about this:
If we take the biggest, toughest and most intractable problem of any community we see immediately that the reason it is so is clearly that the community does not have the ability to deal with it. Water quality is an issue only in places where the community action system has been unable to deal with it. That might be because the community action system is not big enough to address it from a systemic basis, or that the leadership capacity is not strong enough or the collective container is not robust enough, or any combination. Ultimately the biggest problem for any community is: what do we need to do to get our collective power and action working on our toughest problems so that they are no longer our toughest problems?
I wrote a short note on the plane coming home from Denver, and it relates to how absolutely critical harvest is, in terms of focusing our eyes on the ways in which any conversation or meeting might affect a community’s action system. This is an attempt to caputre a simple form of the pitfalls of a false action/talk dichotomy and the necessity for learning, reflection and inquiry in a system.
“If we are wanting stuff to get done by any system, the first question is an appreciative inquiry into how things usually get done in the system so that we know what we are harvesting intoand we understand what forms of harvest will best serve the actions we want to take as a result of any conversation.
But what do we do when the system itself is not up to the task of taking action on a large problem? In that case, the inquiry has to find a way to get the system to act on itself to create the conditions and change necessary for it to become powerful enough to move into action on the intractable problem. This is difficult because it requires “bootstrapping” the system to see itself and then teach itself to be bigger and more powerful.”
I don’t know how to do this. But I feel deeply that THIS is the challenge. We can solve global warming IF we figure out how the world community action system can develop the capacity to address the problem. If we don’t develop that capacity, we won’t solve the problem. We can break it into more manageable bits and pieces that fit what we can already do, but global warming is an emergent phenomenon and it needs an emergent response. So what is the biggest problem? Not global warming…it is us…the biggest problem is the inability of our existing systems to address it. And to me, daunting as it is, that seems like work we can actually do togather.
So that is where I am currently, as a facilitator of deep conversation, interested in how we can connect inquiry, talk, harvest and action to find and use the power we need to make to big changes our world needs.
Your thoughts? What seems especially interesting about this take on wicked problems?
[tags]wicked problems[/tags]