I’m just returning from Calgary where my partner Susan Neden and I have been doing some design and faiclitation work with the imagineCALGARY Roundtable. imagineCALGARY is a 100 year sustainability planning exercise, in the spirit of the Imagine Chicago process.

Last night we took the group through a short Cafe process about their engagment and reasons why the roundtable participants agreed to join the enterprise. In the midst of all the conversation a line stood out for me that rocked me very deeply. In going over the table notes afterwards Susan read out this zinger:

“Cities last longer than countries.”

So true. In 100 years, North America might not host Canada and the United States, but it will still host populations, and it’s more than likely that these populations will still be centered in most of the cities where they now reside. Look at Europe. In some places, people have lived in the same city all their lives, but have been ncitizens of several different countries in that time.

Countries are ideas and so no one does 100 year planning for countries. They depend for their existence on the success of their cities and citizens. Tip O’Neil once said that “all politcs is local” and so too is citizenship. When we ask questions about the future, we do so much more effectively if we can forget about the false and illusive notions of nations and countries and instead look at the concrete places where human beings gather to have their needs met.

It makes me wonder about long range planning for organizations too. Does it make sense to talk about the 50 year plan for XYZ Inc, or ABC Community Services organization? Or instead should we ask questions about what it is that the organizations do? In 50 or 100 years, where will people buy their food? How will they travel from place to place? How will they create culture?

There are real needs and there are illusory structures. We spend an awful lot of time coming up with strategies to prop up houses of cards instead of looking at how our temporary structures meet ongoing and universal human needs. It’s funny what we consider permanent. We think that our organizations will solve problems, that the human needs are temporary and that the organizations will last beyond them. In reality it is the opposite, and useful organizations are those that can grow and shift and be agile enough to continue to serve the constant needs (food, shelter, clohting, expression, community….etc) in an impermanant context.

What if you lived in a country where something like 20% of the population had a phone, and waiting for a phone took 5-10 years?

What if you had pioneered a microlending scheme that enabled very poor women to buy cows and sell the milk?

What if cows=cell phones?

The Grameen Bank, well-known for their micro-credit loan circles has come up with another amazing scheme for building empowerment in poor countries using a distributed business model in which poor people are seen as assets instead of liabilities.

Ethan Zuckerman reports on a presentation by Iqbal Quadir, one of the founders of Grameen Phone, on the way his company has become the biggest in Bangladesh:

Supported distributed networks. It seems to be the way stuff is getting done these days.

I’ve been mulling this one over for a few days. At WorldChanging, Jeremy Faludi posted a set of six ideas on preserving change once you have it. In sum:

• Stricter rules and oversight
• Good public relations
• Networking progress, spreading the benefits through agents at the edges rather than central hubs
• Decentralizing administration and authority
• Self-sustaining financing (make it pay for itself)

This might be a good list to add to. Here are some things I can think of:

• Build learning and deliberation around the progress. Make the gain part of the public conversation around policy by hosting gatherings where citizens can learn more, contribute their thinking and experience the gain for themselves.
• Gather diversity to the cause. Progress will not succeed if it is not supported by a wide variety of people and organizations.
• Discern and work with urgency. Unless there is a compelling need for something, it will take hold in a slower fashion. Understanding why things are urgently needed helps invite commitment.
• Give away the answers. Anything developed to address the issue and support the progress should be freely given away to anyone who wants it, and anyone who can use it. This includes tools, products, marketing and ideas.

This is relevant to gains made in the field of sustainability, but I’m also thinking about issues like Aboriginal youth suicide, First Nations governance, the development of networked, community based service delivery models and other issues I am currently working with – anywhere we are making progress that needs support and long term viability. Relying on government, or a few big government like agencies or companies, is not sustainable.

Any other strategies out there?

I love being a dad. One of the reasons fathering is so great is you get great singing partners out of the deal.

And so in honour of all the fathers out there, and their children, here is an offering for your ears. This is a Tibetan father and son singing together. Enjoy!

George Por went digging around in his archives dating back to the late eighties and came up with an interview he did with Peter Senge on “generic structures.” Senge said:

This fits what Senge would probably later understand as a chaordic understanding of things, how structures arise themselves and sustain themselves with accumulated memory. To me, looking at things from a facilitation perspective, these are the most powerful structures we have. They can be both incredibly liberating and incredibly restricting.

An example of a highly entrenched communication pattern shows up in the “expert-teacher pattern”. This is ingrained through our schooling experiences and shows up everywhere from public meetings to conferences to training models. It is poison to innovation, participation and creativity and it locks people into dispiriting power relationships.

An example of the other extreme probably has its origins in what happened in the school yard as we met to plot the demise of horrible teachers who exploited the expert-teacher pattern. The “schoolyard collaboratory pattern” is predicated on an assumption that everyone in the conversation can offer ideas and they get booted around and discussed until people somehow decide that placing a whoopee cushion on the teacher’s chair is the way to go. We stand around in circles, make the best possible use of short time (15 minute recesses) and no equipment, to engineer a disruption to the system.

Later in life these structures show up in the conversations that are said to really run things: dinner meetings, golf games, cafe chatter, backroom deals and so on. All of the places where we get unstuck from the constraints of formal systems seem to have their origins in the patters of eight year olds standing in a school yard, free from the physical spaces and configurations that imprison us, as we plot the most efficient way to move things along.