Recently, my facilitation practice has increasingly involved helping people to set a simple vision for their work and then to invite them to find a place for themselves in that vision. In Open Space we call that �passion and responsibility� but the truth is those two dynamics are the yin and yang of getting anything done well.
Focussing groups on passion involves facilitating seeing. I find especially that �what if�� questions help a lot in this respect. Asking �what if� proposes a future, but doesn�t worry itself with the details. And it also allows each person to immediately see themselves in that future.
For example, for a community safety planning process I�m engaged in right now, we�re currently playing with the question of �what if we won an award for community safety and that we were cited specifically for how each community played a specific role in achieving our goals? What would your role be in that scenario?� This gathering will involve everyone from elderly neighbours to sexually exploited youth in a tough community plagued by tough dynamics. And yet everyone knows that unless solutions involve everyone, nothing will change for the better. Command and control hasn�t legisl;ated the problems away, in fact it has made them worse. Positing a simple vision of safety for everyone in the community and inviting them to steward that vision is what�s on the table now.
A �what if� question is tasty, and demonstrates exactly an important power of �seeing:� once you see a desired future, you can�t put it back in the bottle. As Thomas King says about stories of transformation, you can do a lot of things, but you can�t say you didn�t hear it. Jonathan Schell, in The Unconquerable World, argues that this quality of real vision is what makes the democratic impulse so strong in people: once participatory democracy is unleashed on the world, it cannot be refuted. Taste freedom or inspiration once, and it�s hard to deny its full emergence.
�What if� questions bring the sophisticated process of seeing to a very practical point. I find that increasingly, my work is about helping people shift from one place to another. Any kind of transformation process requires this kind of forward viewing in order to provide some idea of where we are going. So I am finding �what if� questions, and the accompanying challenge to individuals – passion AND responsibility, remember – to see themselves in that new future to be useful in just about every context, be it planning, consultation, community building or organizational development.
I�ve been following the work of Adam Kahane for a while now, and have just been reading his latest book, Solving Tough Problems. In it, he recounts his experiences over the years of working with groups to varying degrees of success engaging in the practice of talking and listening deeply. It�s a wonderful book.
Talking and listening are the �implementation� side of good visioning. Kahane is a master of scenario planning, having worked for years at Shell and subsequently on the Mont Fleur scenario project (.pdf) that played a significant role in inviting South Africa�s diverse political players to envision post-apartheid futures. On the surface these exercises seem na�ve, dreaming up possible futures. But the reason for powerful and symbolic views of a future emerging reality is, as Kahane says, that the future is unpredictable. And why is it unpredictable? �One reason the future is unpredictable,� says Kahane, �is that it can be influenced.�
The trick to influencing the future is seeing now how that future might emerge and to find a way to influence it for the best. Using �what if� questions to cast very basic but compelling visions helps us to set the stage for the deep dialogue, engagement and conversation that loosens up our present and takes us to new levels of participating in the emerging and envisioned future.