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 \u00ef\u00bf\u00bdpassion and responsibility\u00ef\u00bf\u00bd but the truth is those two dynamics are the yin and yang of getting anything done well. <\/p>\n
Focussing groups on passion involves facilitating seeing. I find especially that \u00ef\u00bf\u00bdwhat if\u00ef\u00bf\u00bd\u00ef\u00bf\u00bd questions help a lot in this respect. Asking \u00ef\u00bf\u00bdwhat if\u00ef\u00bf\u00bd proposes a future, but doesn\u00ef\u00bf\u00bdt worry itself with the details. And it also allows each person to immediately see themselves in that future.<\/p>\n
For example, for a community safety planning process I\u00ef\u00bf\u00bdm engaged in right now, we\u00ef\u00bf\u00bdre currently playing with the question of \u00ef\u00bf\u00bdwhat 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?\u00ef\u00bf\u00bd 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\u00ef\u00bf\u00bdt 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\u00ef\u00bf\u00bds on the table now.<\/p>\n
A \u00ef\u00bf\u00bdwhat if\u00ef\u00bf\u00bd question is tasty, and demonstrates exactly an important power of \u00ef\u00bf\u00bdseeing:\u00ef\u00bf\u00bd once you see a desired future, you can\u00ef\u00bf\u00bdt put it back in the bottle. As Thomas King<\/a> says about stories of transformation, you can do a lot of things, but you can\u00ef\u00bf\u00bdt say you didn\u00ef\u00bf\u00bdt hear it. Jonathan Schell, in The Unconquerable World<\/a>, 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\u00ef\u00bf\u00bds hard to deny its full emergence. <\/p>\n \u00ef\u00bf\u00bdWhat if\u00ef\u00bf\u00bd 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 \u00ef\u00bf\u00bdwhat if\u00ef\u00bf\u00bd 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. <\/p>\n I\u00ef\u00bf\u00bdve been following the work of Adam Kahane<\/a> for a while now, and have just been reading his latest book, Solving Tough Problems<\/a>. 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\u00ef\u00bf\u00bds a wonderful book. <\/p>\n