I don’t shy away from the fact that diversity is essential to creating processes that are inclusive and give us as much situational awareness and access to distributed intelligence as possible. The current attacks on diversity from ideological perspectives are direct attacks on making groups of people smarter. If you narrow the opportunity and the resources to look at and understand situations you limit the scope of possible action, and you make yourself a lot less intelligent and responsive that the context or your competition.
If your organization used a DEI policy as the only addressed the need for diversity of lived experience in your work, you were probably not doing it right. Performative diversity doesn’t help. Mandating a certain amount of diversity is still a technical solution to a complex problem. The problem is “how do we best understand the current context in which we are operating in order to find the best ways to act.” If the context is a complex one, increasing the degrees of diversity in the process gives one more access to the distributed intelligence of the field in which you are operating.
One of the places that this shows up in participatory work is in the way we invite people to the work. How do you find people you don’t know and generate enough comfort, trust and ease that they can show up and contribute?
Trust is an emergent property of relationships so one trick here is to work with the constraints of connection and exchange. The challenge is how to find people that have proximity to the issue at hand and that are unknown to those who find themselves in the centre of the problem. And it is compounded by a need to overcome trust issues stemming from factors such as status, knowledge, power, power and resources.
We once addressed this problem using this constraints strategy when working with a local foundation who was conducting some community engagement sessions for a new program design. The issue for them had always been the “usual suspects” problem: the same people kept showing up in the same way. Part of the problems was structural: meetings were held during the day and there was no child care for example. Part of the problem was the power and status gradient between the foundation – who was a powerful presence in the community – and the community itself. Many of the people who would show up to engagement sessions were those hoping to secure grants or those who were already funded but the foundation. This would skew participation in unhelpful ways as people tried to balance competing agendas around their own participation.
Yet the tension was real. We needed familiars to extend the reach of invitation to those who had knowledge to contribute to the problem and who would have enough trust to share it.
We began by making a list of invitees and we contacted them to ask them to personally invite one person in their network who was different from them and had never been to a foundation event. We didn’t specific how they had to be different, but we did ask that the invited person be new to foundation events. This simple action extended the invitation beyond the group that was known to the foundation staff and used existing networks of trust and relationship to cultivate difference and diversity. The resulting gathering was positively received and the program staff and participants said the quality of learning was noticeably different. Many of the new people who came felt pleased to be directly invited and so the level of engagement and participation at the meeting was higher than usual as well.
This idea and this approach was enabled by our understanding of how constraints work in shaping complex environments. Working with constraints to shape interactions between people is the work of the host in complex environments. We don’t know what the outcome will be, but when we want to change things, we settle on a direction towards “better” and work with the constraints available to us to see what will happen. In this case simply removing barriers – by providing food and child care for example – was not enough on its own to increase diversity. We needed to work with the exchanges between people to piggy back on existing trust networks to see if we could generate more trust and a different profile of participants.
It worked. What emerged at the event was a broader perspective on the issues at hand and ideas for crafting the new program. It alos brought new people to the work of the foundation, some of whom carried on to be involved with the new program.
Increasing diversity didn’t require a policy or a program. It was rooted in the real need in a complex context, which will always require diversity to scan, plan and design with the community in a context-appropriate way.
The end of Viktor Orban’s reign had all the hallmarks of similar transitions from the authoritarian governments of Eastern Europe thirty years ago: a largely peaceful transition of power because the people finally decided that they would be ungovernable by this particular tyrant.
Autocracy runs on fear—on the assumption that enough people, confronted with sufficient consequences, will decide that compliance is safer than truth. What dismantled Orbán’s operation was the accumulation of individual decisions to the contrary.
Orban is still in parliament as opposition leader and his state apparatus still exists. But his election loss, although not the same as the fall of the former Eastern European Communist governments in the 1990s, put me in mind of the thesis championed by Havel, of living in truth. It seems that the Hungarian people, despite election rigging and gerrymandering, just got sick of being ruled by an illiberal autocrat with deep ties to the insane administrations of both Russia and the United States. My hope is that the people of Hungary have demonstrated the way, even through rigged electoral politics, to depose of a “democratic dictator.” Others may follow.
Another article about what it’s like to teach in the era of LLMs. I’m interested to read these and see how they change over time as the LLMs change, school policies and pedagogy changes and students change. The part that resonates for me about this one is “friction.”
Helen Palmer has collected a number of different voices describing the Cynefin framework and some if it’s underlying theory and practice. It’s a useful primer to where the thinking is on this particular framework
Earlier this month, Cynthia Kurtz announced that she was re-launching her Participatory Narrative Inquiry practicum courses. This a really good opportunity to discover this set of practices and approach to working with stories.
I was part of her first deep dive cohort a few years ago and it really was good.It stretched me and grounded me in this approach. Cynthia is intending to offer these course three times a year starting in May. If you are curious about PNI, the introductory course is the way to go. If you'd like to apply PNI to a small project, the PNI Essentials course will help you do that.
For a bigger project using NarraFirma, the Deep Dive course is what you need. It's important that you have a project in mind and ready to go for this course, because after all these are practicums. You'll learn at a steady pace over 20 weeks with Cynthia and a cohort of co-learners. This is a significant investment of time, but it is well structured and incredibly useful and resource-rich useful learning.
I'm really glad she is offering these programs. Spread the word and consider joining one to learn directly from this font of knowledge and wisdom. Cynthia's work is powerful, practical and will almost certainly fill a need you're curious about, especially if you are a regular reader of this blog.
Just back from teaching participatory leadership to 35 university leaders in Dallas, Texas and arrive home to find this great course outline that Cedric Jamet has put together for his university students.
This stuff is insanely useful. A set pot permanent skills that are needed for applications throughout a person’s life. ESPECIALLY in the university, where academic leaders are rarely offered any leadership training at all. Imagine now, learning how to do this in your graduate work and then putting it to use as you grow in your academic career. And imagine meeting people along the way who know what you are doing and what your are talking about because they understand the reason for leading this way and how it helps to make things better.
Writing isn’t just a way of communication. It is a way of learning about yourself and learning how to show up, how to speak, how to develop and wrestle with ideas. Learning to write is enabled by good constraints, by a purpose that is not about the artifact but about the process of its creation. Cory Doctorow today talks about learning to write in the university context, where writing is almost always about the artifact and not the process. He shares experiences of great writing workshops because his experience is that learning how to write is relational.
It’s revelatory. It teaches you what you know. It lets you know what you know. It lets you know more than you know. It’s alchemical. It creates new knowledge, and dispels superstition. It sharpens how you think. It sharpens how you talk. And obviously, it sharpens how you write.
I appreciate too how he talks about the stakes that students face. Reporting on a faculty meeting he attended at Cornell, Doctorow writes:
It was a faculty discussion, and one of the people at the table had been involved in a research project to investigate students’ attitudes to their education. The research concluded that students come to Cornell to learn – because they love knowledge and critical thinking – but they are so haunted by the financial consequences of failure (wasting tens, if not hundreds, of thousands of dollars repeating a year or failing out altogether, and then entering the job market debt-burdened and degree-less) that they feel pressured not to take intellectual risks, and, at worst, to cheat. They care about learning, but they’re afraid of bad grades, and so chasing grades triumphs over learning.
That is unreal pressure. It usually takes several years in a professional context before people are allowed to make six figure decisions that impact people’s lives and yet we expect that students take this into consideration with every test and reading and essay they have to write.
If you find out that your degree isn’t what you want to study, or you had shitty profs who ruined your learning experience, or you drop out to do something else, you still owe the money back.
So try being a student with $50,000 in debt on the line. Why wouldn’t you use ChatGPT to produce something the exactly matches the rubric for success upon which you will be graded? The risk not doing so is too great.
Cory’s meditation on learning to write is a microcosm of what universities are facing. The constraints that now exist on teachers and students of higher learning have transformed institutions ever further away for their stated missions of being places of learning and inquiry. Universities are trying hard to balance their core missions of creating spaces active and powerful learning, research and intellectual formation with the ill informed political mandates that are constraining that very mission. The result will be devastating over the long term, doubling down on a generation of students who are already indentured debtors, who were educated in a way that minimally supported their learning by teachers who were prevented from teaching good process and helping students explore, stumble, fail, and grow.
That has impacts on the workplace because it requires employers to do the education that universities are no longer able to do. If a student doesn’t learn to write in university because the cost of failure is too high they are going to have to learn on the job. Most employers trust the education system to provide them with generally competent well rounded people that are capable of basic permanent skills. That’s the bargain of public education.
When I hear employers complaining about “this current generation” of new graduates it makes me want to ask them what they did to ensure that the public education system was working at its absolute best. The ability for folks to teach and learn at every level of the education system has been eroded by resources cut by austerity measures or ideological decisions. The pressure from people who are employers to cut government funding or to go to war against particular ideological bugaboos, be they social, cultural or scientific, further erodes both the resources and methods that are used to educate students.
Writing, reading, expressing yourself, engaging in dialogue, collaborating, and creating are all permanent skills. The trend in education of all kinds is to make these skills inferior to the measurable and temporary skills because they are not measurable in transactional and financially relevant ways. They are life skills. They require mentorship, safety in failure and exploration from teachers who can help a student see where they are and grow. Education should be the place from which students are launched with the ability to develop and refine their practices of these skills over a lifetime.
This is how a university turns out citizens who contribute to the world from a secure place of knowledge and confidence. Trained as permanent learners.
Short-term thinking driven by fiscal or ideological concerns builds a system that encourages students to cheat, or more precisely, waste their learning time gaming the system so they achieve the carrot of approval. It drives teachers crazy, who grow more and more powerless to stop it. And it turns out into the world young adults who are woefully ill equipped for a world of massive uncertainty which requires diverse brilliance, talent and creativity.