Visioning as the estuary of action

December 7, 2011 By

This is an estuary.  It is the place where a river goes to die.  Everything the river has ever been and everything it has carried within it, is deposited at it’s mouth where the flow slows down and the water merges with the ocean.  These are places of incredible calm and richness, but they lack the exciting flow of the torrents and waterfalls and cascades of the upper river system.

Yesterday I was speaking with a client who worried that an initiative we had begun together was heading towards the estuary of action – a long term visioning processes where lots of things are said and very little is done.  ”We’ve done that before,” she said.  Nobody likes that.  I wracked my brain to see where it was that I had led this group to believe that this is what we were doing.  We had done a World Cafe to check into some possibilities for the organization and we had done a short Open Space to initiatie some experimental actions.  We had learned a little about the organization from these two gatherings, and we were, at least in my mind, fully entered into a participatory action learning cycle, working with emergent ideas, within several well established constraints.  I was surprised to hear the fear spoken that what we were doing was “visioning.”

Then I realized that what we were dealing with was an entrained pattern.  People within this organization associated dialogue with visioning, and the results of dialogue with a mass of post-it notes and flip charts that never get typed up, and action that never comes of it.  Likewise, it turns out that the associated planning with a process that begins with a vision, and then costs out a plan and takes that plan to a decision making body which then rules on whether the project can proceed, by allocating resources.  Both of these views are old thinking, rigid patterns that lock participants in a linear view of action that looks like this:

 

 

The truth is that I had been viewing the process as an action learning cycle:





So now that we are a little clearer on this, there was a distinct relaxation among the group.  We are heading into some uncharted territory and it is too early to nail down concrete plans about what to do and likewise simply visioning doesn’t take us anywhere either.  Instead, we are harvesting some of the rich sense of community that exists, opening some space for a little leadership, inviting passion and responsibility and making small starts,  The small starts are confirming some of what we suspected about how the organization works, which is good news, because we are developing a pattern of action together that will help us all as we move forward to do bigger things with more extensive resource implications.  This is the proper role of vision and planning in emergent and participatory processes – gentle, developmental, reflective and active.

 

Filed Under: BC, Design, emergence, Flow, Improv, Leadership, Learning, Open Space, World Cafe Tagged With:

Love and power, holons and process

November 29, 2011 By

Graphic from puramaryam.de

Last night as part of a leadership retreat we are doing for the the Federation of Community Social Services of BC, we took a bus into Vancouver from Bowen Island to listen to Adam Kahane speak. He spoke last night on the ten laws of love and power (the essence of which you can see amongst these Google results).  There are a couple of new insights from the talk he gave which I appreciate.

Love and power as a complimentary system. Adam’s project is to recover useful definitions of love and power and to see them in a complimentary system.  Seeing these two forces this way creates all kinds of important strategic imperatives in systems – moving from degenerative power to generative love, from degenerative love to generative power.  This is polarity management in it’s core…the ability to keep a system of complimentary poles in a rhythm that oscillates between the upsides of both, but never rests in one or the other.  This dynamic approach to love and power invites us to become skillful at both.  The approach is fundamentally Taoist!

Turtles all the way down. We had a brief exchange about what is going on with the #Occupy movement in terms of this framework.  A question was asked about whether #Occupy represented a love move or a power move.  I said that I saw #Occupy representing a drive to wholeness, a unifying effort to unite the 99% – a love move.  Much of the process evident at the three Occupy camps I have been to has been about inclusion and joining.  Adam saw it differently.  By distinguishing ourselves from the 100%, #Occupy is a power move because it is a drive towards the self-realization of the 99%.  This is fascinating to me because it pointed out that love and power drives operate in different ways, in different scales even within the same process,  This is what makes it so tricky to be in thiss dynamic.  You have to understand at which level your love or power move is working.  In everything we are involved in there are multiple levels of scale and focus (“turtles all the way down“) and skillful leadership is as much about knowing which scale you are at as it is about making the right move.  Also Taoist: moving in line with the times and the context. This idea of acting in scale has come into our work today where we are looking at the living and dying systems model developed by Meg Wheatley, Deborah Frieze and a number of us in Berkana.  Living systems scale, and exhibit similar patterns at each level.

Holons. That leads to the next insight, which is Adam’s use of the concept of holons to describe how systems are influenced by love and power.  I like this a lot, because holons represent a stable structure at every level.  I first was introduced to the idea of holons through Ken Wilber’s work, who developed the concept frost proposed by Arthur Koestler.  Adam’s use of holons to illustrate love and power is very useful.  Love in this case is the holon’s drive for connection and integration and power is the holon’s drive towards self-realization and differentiation.  There can be many drives moving simultaneously, hence my use of the above graphic, which gets the picture across.

Power/love moves in process design. Adam spoke about “moves” that are called for when the power/love dynamic tips too far to ones side or the other.  This comes from Barry Johnson’s work in polarity management, and for process designers, it has important implications.  Using the love/power dynamic, we can make choices about the kinds of processes that we use to bring people together or to create the drive for self-realization.  Adam mused that in process design and facilitation, World Cafe was a good example of a love move (as it tends the group to wholeness based on the fact that there is one questions that the whole group explores) and Open Space Technology as a good example of a power move (as it is dependant on agency and diverse streams of self-realization happening simultaneously).  I though this was a pretty useful observation, and it behooves us as process designers and facilitators to think about this construction in the design choices we make.

Adam’s work on this stuff has legs because it is a very simple concept which becomes immensely complex in practice.  But importantly, it is practice.  Efforts to understand it in theory can be limited.  The dynamic of practice, the complicated roughshod effort to get it right is where the reward is.

Filed Under: Art of Hosting, BC, Community, Design, Facilitation, Leadership, Open Space, Organization, Practice, World Cafe Tagged With:

At the intersection of power and participation

September 29, 2011 By

Leaving New York today. It has been an incredible four days here working with my good friends Kelly McGowan and Tuesday Ryan-Hart and Lex Schroeder, Aniestla Rugama, Alissa Schwartz, and Aswad Foster. We were running a workshop called the Art of Social Justice in which we were investigating the intersection of participatory process and social justice work. Over three days we explored a framework that Tuesday has developed and investigated with Kelly for the past year. The framework includes and transcends the gifts and drawbacks of traditional social justice frameworks and of what we know about participatory process.

Tuesday is writing a lot more about this, but the essence of the framework is that neither social justice analysis nor participatory process are enough on their own to move us into the new forms of leadership that are needed in a world where social inequity and power are becoming increasingly complex, and where traditional forms of organizing are no longer reflective of the interconnected nature of global society..

A gift of traditional social justice analysis is the way it understands personal and collective power and privilege. This analysis concerns itself with transformation of both the personal and the social power dynamics in society, but it often contains within it an invisible current of control that runs deep in the architecture of social change process. It posits a social separation between those of us who are working for change in or allied with the struggle of oppressed peoples, and people in the system that are thought to be – traditionally – the enemy. Or it sets up a struggle between the system that perpetuates oppression and the people who are oppressed by it. In this world, in this time, that analysis is out of date. We are all connected to the entire system. As I showed in my last post, you can even discover how many slaves you employ. Even if you are heavily marginalized within the mainstream, you are connected to the system itself. As the sign said at Occupy Wall Street, “you are us.”

Those of us who are facilitators of participatory process often make grand claims about the power of processes like Open Space Technology and World Cafe to even out power differences. In a circle everyone is said to be equal and leadership can come from every chair. While participatory process does provide a useful methodology for decolonizing how we meet, it has several risks associated with it. For one thing, if we fail to take into consideration the context in which we are working, power can show up in participatory process in a dangerously invisible way. Some participants may be able to operate much more resourcefully because of their power or privilege by, for example, becoming the scribes for small groups and speaking for the group. Those who cannot write may not feel comfortable posting a session in Open Space, meaning that there is no way that their voices can be heard or their contributions incorporated. Furthermore, participatory processes, like all facilitation processes, heavily depend on the role of the facilitator. If the facilitators (and the process designers for that matter) are not aware of the currents of power and privilege within the context in which they are working, they run the risk of designing structures that keep marginalized people marginalized. If they come to the hosting role without awareness of and good practice around their own power and privilege, the social architecture that emerges can be very exclusionary.

Both of these fields of analysis have something to offer to one another and both have their own drawbacks, In Tuesday’s framework, she identifies a middle path, which she named co-revealation. It is going to take me a while to unpack this concept, but I can at least begin to see how it works. In the space of power-aware participatory leadership, the gift of relationship is active. As we move together through process, the emphasis on relationship is key and in working together relationship becomes more revealed. In the process, we treat each other with more and more grace and compassion, coming to see that as we are all interconnected both to each other and the systems in which we are working to change, we recognize that personal and social transformation is also both inevitable and required. In Saskatoon last week, one of our participants in the Art of Hosting was carrying the question “how do we collaborate with dictators?” as a way of trying to discern the limits of participation. In several conversations over these last two weeks I have come to ask that question of myself, and reframing it as “how do I collaborate with myself when I am being a dictator?”. With that inquiry active, we may find that dictatorship behaviors are present everywhere, and we may also allow ourselves and others the grace to be imperfect in our lives and behaviors. This doesn’t excuse violence or oppression, but rather it gives us serious skin in the game in trying to address oppressive systems. If we are not a part of the problem we cannot be a part of the solution. And in being a part of the problem we need to treat each other with some kindness and latitude, qualities that are born in relationship, even relationship with people with whom we have fundamental differences.

It may feel as if this stuff is a little old hat, but I experienced it differently in practice. During our gathering in New York a group of three participants brought a proposal into the third day check in circle that required a complete think of our agenda, in doing so they were both proposing a new idea but also challenging the power structure of the system. The design team had been designing the days as we went and hosting the process, but here the participants were inviting us to practice what we preached about awareness of power. The group could have chosen to create a drama around the situation, but our field of relationship was very strong. And so they issued the challenge as an invitation We immediately went into a circle process first to seek everyone else’s thoughts on the proposal and second to gain clarity around how to make it work. It was clear in our group that the idea being proposed – that we all go down to Occupy Wall Street and learn what we can there – was both an excellent idea, and also not one that everyone wanted to do. In the circle, I expressed my faith in the resourcefulness of the group and the design team to offer and hold multiple options so that the decision did not have to be an either/or choice. Towards the end of the first round of circle a proposal began to emerge that made some sense, and seemed workable. Kelly and I, as host and guardian of the circle, invited a round for additional clarity followed by one more round of any refinements to the proposal. Then we thumb-voted on it, took care of two small questions and went forward with a great new design for the day.

What emerged was a process whereby the morning would be spent in proaction café which offers people a chance to work on projects. The group that wanted to go down to Wall Street decided to use that time to prepare a learning journey for themselves while others worked on other projects. The afternoon was devoted to nuts and bolts learning in our space while about nine people went off to the occupation. We reconvened at 300 and had two short fishbowls to report on what each group had learned. That harvest was recorded both in video and on flip charts so tat it could be made available to the wider community.

Among the many lessons of the day was the fact that Tuesday’s ideas take us beyond the realm of analysis and into a practice of this middle space. In fact the middle space of co-revelation can only live in practice, it has no power in analysis or in the kinds of theoretical debates that rage without relationship. In those domains the middle space disappears.

It is hard to capture exactly the effect this week has had on my practice, but it deeply continues the theme of “seeing more clearly” that has been the greatest gift of my journey in and around the Art of Hosting community of practice for the past seven years. In our workshops and learning events, we seek less to train people in methodologies and more to situate participatory process in its wider context. Doing so gives the methodologies power and effectiveness and activates the deeper gifts of invitation, collaboration, participation and transformation. And although the word feels raw and new and vague, I think I can finally describe what we do as assisting groups to enter into the space of co-revelation. That was Tuesday’s gift to the group, and that was the group’s significant gift to ourselves.

And as if to confirm it, I sensed this new space active in Liberty Park on the two nights we went down there. The young people who are organizing Occupy Wall Street are doing so in a way that gives profound insight into this concept, but that is the subject of another post.

 

Filed Under: Art of Hosting, BC, Collaboration, Community, Facilitation, Leadership, Open Space, Organization, Practice, World Cafe Tagged With:

Working at the margins

July 29, 2011 By

I’m currently engaged in a number of projects that have me working at the margins, exploring margins, eliminating margins and generally working with difference, otherness, power and exclusion.  These projects include:

  • Running an Open Space Technology event in September to create collaborative actions around reducing addictions-related stigma in the health system in Vancouver.
  • Working with the Lutheran Immigration and Refugee Service in the United States on supporting and expanding a culture of welcome and acceptance in their work with migrants and refugees, work that is stunningly radical in the context of the current “conversation” on immigration in the USA.
  • Part of a team co-hosting an Art of Social Justice gathering in New York City, looking at how power, privilege, race, class and other forms of marginalization and control crop up in society and what challenges those pose for the application of self-organization and participatory leadership in addressing these challenges.
  • Working with youth organizations that support the reduction of stigma for youth with mental illnesses in Ontario and the inclusion of youth voice in policy and practice.

What is common to these projects is the idea that voices matter, that diversity matters and that the reality of community life now is that solutions to complex social problems are not going to emerge without participation from the margins.  It is in fact the margins that will probably produce the solutions to the radical problems facing societies these days.  If you look at the debate in the United States between Republican and Democrats about the fiscal future of the State, the conversation is being conducted on very narrow lines.  There is a huge hole in the debate where the voices of those disempowered by the current financial situation are not being heard.  A radical restructuring of the way people think about national economies is needed if the US is to make a transition from what is clearly an unsustainable path to something that ensures that the needs of citizens are met over the long term.  Where are the solutions?  They are not in the Congress, the are not in the financial pages of the newspaper, they are not at Davos, or the G20 or the IMF or on Wall Street.

It is the same with all of the intractable problems that we face.  My friend Willie Tolliver, one of our Elders for the work we are doing in New York, says that change in social systems comes from clients, not from those within the system.  Radical changes are driven by the clients and consumers of services re-designing the structures that provide for them.  It happens when people claim the ownership of a problem and are able to get their hands on enough power to turn the ship.  What keeps those voices out of the conversation is both the vested power and the unconscious practice of privilege which excludes and stigmatizes voices from the margins, and especially the voices and talents and capacities of those who have been victimized, oppressed, excluded or plain beaten down by the prevailing system.

It’s time for movement and movements, for action and activism, for engaging with power and questioning power, for creating ties and breaking them.  That’s what’s in the air at the moment.

 

Filed Under: Art of Hosting, BC, Collaboration, Community, Design, Facilitation, Invitation, Leadership, Open Space, World Cafe Tagged With:

Insights on the nature of the times

May 23, 2011 By

I am here in the Morton Arboretum in Chicago where we are at the end of the first day of an Art of Hosting with our friends in the Illinois community of practice.  We have just been harvesting out of a World Cafe that was held on the question of  ”What time it is in the world?”  We used a design I have been using with teams and communities that are needing to do deep sensing.  We went for three rounds on the same question and had the hosts at each table go and deeper into the conversations that were emerging.  At the end of the Cafe, the hosts gathered in a fishbowl in the middle of the rest of the group and shared their insights, sensing into the patterns that were emerging.  I listened with a poet’s ear tuned to the harvest and this is what I heard:

 

You have to be ready to die on the hill atop which you have heard the deepest call of the world

 

When you open the smallest space in your life, passion can erode obligation. You become more social, unable to be unaware.

 

You cannot see yourself in the window of a rushing train but only for a second.  You need to slow down so that the reflection can be studied, a life examined.

 

What would a world looki like that is flowing in responsibility, courage, reverence and wakanza?

 

Responsibility and courage are individual acts.  Reverance and wakanza are products of the collective context, they are responses that are woken up in us by the times.

 

Our children our the gift we make to the future, they are the long stake in the long view, the holders of wisdom, those carriers of what we have learned about how we have lived.

We are the ones we have been waiting for, and we have been waiting for lives and times beyond our own, living in lives and times beyond our own.  We see ourselves as the gift to ourselves when others make it clear in relationship.

 

Our conversations touch every single other conversation.  The world unfolds as one point presses upon another in a great chain of implication and connectivity.  The technology of interconnection is vulnerability – the capacity to be open to one another.  In that small open space, influence takes root.  Ideas enter in that seem to have always been there.

 

I move and leave pieces of myself behind, and I have no story of grieving?  No way to midwife the new in the hospice of the dying?  What is being born when things are dying, what enters in when there is a puase in the breath between generations, between conversations, between breaths and between heart beats?

 

In the moments of silence that open between sounds, there is a chance for the smallest voice to be heard.  The babble dies down and there is a pause and a small call has its chance to invite.  Judgement kills that voice – sometimes aborts it before it even ever enters the world.

 

All we have are ideas – take a stand, do what you can to help others to stand.  You can reach back to the head of every river to see why it is full of what it is full of.  Every tributary signs its joining with specific minerals, with salts and metals, with vegetation and fish.  You can find home by simply following the taste of it.

 

Host others, but host yourself first. Listen to others but first learn to listen to the wind, to listen to the birds and the way the ground moves beneath the feet of the deer.  Learn to listen to why people say the things they say.  To what soil or water fills their syllables with longing.

 

Presence.  When you host you can become the vehicle through which the world speaks its story.  And you hear what you are built for and you speak what you see in yourself.

 

We are not too busy for change, we are instead addicted to avoiding what is real and what needs doing.  People are the agents for their own freedom.  But that freedom cannot be won without something being let go.  We are in a culture that doesn’t end things very well, but instead loads layers and layers of more on top of the foundation.  With no rite of passage available, nothing gets completed and ushered out, there is no way to make space for the new.  Honour and reverence.

 

We are crying for passages through and for the rites to understand them and to be invited into them.

 

Can you be authentic in your work if you’re not authentic in your personal life?  How do you discover you are not aware of yourself without rites of passage and ceremonies that acknowledge what is coming and what is gone, what is to be picked up and what is to be put down.

 

How do we foster self-awareness when we perceive crises and emergency?  We tell the truth and we tell all the stories, even the ones that represent success and resilience and that buck the trend of the depressing scarcity that keeps us embedded in fear, we insert pauses where previously we would rush to solutions.

 

We are a greedy culture, but we can be greedy for community and that hurts no one because it only activates the abundance that sleeps in a cradle of scarcity.  We can’t afford to throw a few things on the grill and offer some to the neighbours?  Come to me in the late sun of the evening when the wind is still and the birds think before they sing, and cars pass by quietly in the languid air.  Come and share a meal, and tell me what is in your heart.

 

Like Meg says,

Notice what is going on.

Get started.

Learn as you go.

Stick together.

 

Filed Under: Art of Harvesting, Art of Hosting, BC, Collaboration, Community, Conversation, Facilitation, Leadership, Poetry, World Cafe Tagged With:

What harvesting tool works best?

February 11, 2011 By

A colleague emailed today and asked me this question: “which tool do you use when you have to analyse the content of your harvest with groups?”

My answer was that it depends on so much.  Which means there is no one rule or tool but rather a principle.  The principle would be this: “Participatory process, participatory harvest, simple process, simple harvest”  The primary tool I use in complex decision making domains is diversity.

A story.  Once, working with the harvest of a a series of 4 world cafes that had about 100 people in each, I ended up with 400 index cards, each containing a single insight which we later transcribed.  It would be folly for me to work with a taxonomy of my own design, so I invited eight people to help me make sense of the work.  We all read the 18 peages of raw data and noticed what spoke to us.  From there we created a conversation that drew forth those insights and organized them into patterns.  The final result was a report to the 400 people that had gathered that was rich and diverse and as complex as the group itself without being overly complicated to implement.

So it depends.  If you use the Cynefin framework, which I have been studying and using a lot lately, you will see that different domains of action require different harvesting and sense making tools.  So be careful, use what is appropriate and try to never have a place where one point of view dominates the meaning making if you are indeed operating the realms of complexity, chaos or disorder..

Filed Under: Art of Harvesting, BC, Collaboration, Design, emergence, Facilitation, World Cafe Tagged With:

Society is the still face

December 22, 2010 By

Back in November, I worked with my mate Teresa Posakony on a two day gathering the object of which was to work to apply brain science to policy questions on the prevention of adverse childhood experiences.  On the first day I facilitated an Open Space event that brought together reserachers and brain scientists to discuss their findings and on the second day, we had panelists and Teresa ran a half day cafe to look at the implications of the research for policy making.  I composed a poem at the end of the day.

As a part of the experience, we were shown a powerful video of the still face experiment, a test to see how infants respond when their care givers break the connection with them.  It is very very powerful.  Here it is:

Later in the day one of the panelists, Jennifer Rodriguez, referred to this video by saying that collectively, “society is the still face” when it comes to our children and youth.

That was the hook I needed for the poem, which was also informed by the words I saw and heard during the cafe.  I read the poem and got a generous standing ovation.

Today I got an email from our clients which was sent by the researcher you see in the video, Dr. Ed. Tronick.  Dr. Tronick was responding to our client, who sent him the poem and the recording of me reading it:

I really am quite moved by the poem and your comment about how much impact it has.  When I began this work in my lab I had no idea that it might one day be so useful in getting children and families what they so desperately need.  I love the poem – I will get it up in my office somewhere, especially what it brings together and the rhythm of it.  Please tell Chris how much I appreciate it.  It is just amazing.  And more important than the SF or the poem is the work you and everyone at the conference are doing.

It is not enough to do work in the world without adding as much beauty as we can.  The power resides in the songs, the poems, the images that we use to capture our collective experiences and to throw a light on how important they are to us as human beings.

Enjoy the harvest.

Filed Under: Art of Harvesting, BC, Community, Facilitation, Improv, Poetry, World Cafe Tagged With:

Society is the still face

December 22, 2010 By

Back in November, I worked with my mate Teresa Posakony on a two day gathering the object of which was to work to apply brain science to policy questions on the prevention of adverse childhood experiences.  On the first day I facilitated an Open Space event that brought together reserachers and brain scientists to discuss their findings and on the second day, we had panelists and Teresa ran a half day cafe to look at the implications of the research for policy making.  I composed a poem at the end of the day.

As a part of the experience, we were shown a powerful video of the still face experiment, a test to see how infants respond when their care givers break the connection with them.  It is very very powerful.  Here it is:

Later in the day one of the panelists, Jennifer Rodriguez, referred to this video by saying that collectively, “society is the still face” when it comes to our children and youth.

That was the hook I needed for the poem, which was also informed by the words I saw and heard during the cafe.  I read the poem and got a generous standing ovation.

Today I got an email from our clients which was sent by the researcher you see in the video, Dr. Ed. Tronick.  Dr. Tronick was responding to our client, who sent him the poem and the recording of me reading it:

I really am quite moved by the poem and your comment about how much impact it has.  When I began this work in my lab I had no idea that it might one day be so useful in getting children and families what they so desperately need.  I love the poem – I will get it up in my office somewhere, especially what it brings together and the rhythm of it.  Please tell Chris how much I appreciate it.  It is just amazing.  And more important than the SF or the poem is the work you and everyone at the conference are doing.

It is not enough to do work in the world without adding as much beauty as we can.  The power resides in the songs, the poems, the images that we use to capture our collective experiences and to throw a light on how important they are to us as human beings.

Enjoy the harvest.

Filed Under: Art of Harvesting, BC, Community, Facilitation, Improv, Poetry, World Cafe Tagged With:

Inspiring hope and change

October 22, 2010 By

From my recent work in the labour movement, a quote to inspire you in your work for social change:

Howard Zinn: ‎”To be hopeful in bad times is not just foolishly romantic. It is based on the fact that human history is a history not only of cruelty, but also of compassion, sacrifice, courage, kindness. What we choose to emphasize in this complex history will determine our lives. If we… see only the worst, it destroys our capacity to do something. If we remember those times and places—and there are so many—where people have behaved magnificently, this gives us the energy to act, and at least the possibility of sending this spinning top of a world in a different direction. And if we do act, in however small a way, we don’t have to wait for some grand utopian future. The future is an infinite succession of presents, and to live now as we think human beings should live, in defiance of all that is bad around us, is itself a marvelous victory.”

I’m in Prince George today and tomorrow working with the BC Government Employees Union in a great regional conference that is looking at forging the links between unions and communities.  There is much organizing capacity and heart based action in the labour movement and much need on the ground here in the north of the province.  Putting one to work on the other is a huge and easy capacity building thing to do.

So today a cafe on where we can go to work in community to make a difference, and tomorrow a short Open Space for people to ground action and make some plans to get out there.

Filed Under: BC, Being, Collaboration, Community, Open Space, World Cafe Tagged With:

Meg Wheatley’s 12 principles for supporting healthy community

May 25, 2010 By

I’m a sucker for principles, because principles help us to design and do what is needed and help us to avoid bringing pre-packaged ideas and one-size-fits-all solutions to every problem.  And of course, I’m a sucker for my friend Meg Wheatley. Today, in our Art of Hosting workshop in central Illinois, Tenneson Woolf and Teresa Posakony brought some of Meg’s recent thinking on these principles to a group of 60 community developers working in education, child and family services, and restorative justice.  We’re excited to be working nwith these principles in the work we’re doing with Berkana Institute.  Here’s what I heard:

1. People support what they create. Where are you NOT co-creating?  Even the most participatory process always have an edge of focused control or design.  Sometimes that is wise, but more often than not we design, host and harvest without consciousness.  Are we engaging with everyone who has a stake in this issue?

2. People act most responsibly when they care. Passion and responsibility is how work gets done.  We know this from Open Space – as Peggy Holman is fond of saying, invite people to take responsibility for what they love.  What is it you can’t NOT do?  Sometime during this week I have heard someone describe an exercise where you strip away everything you are doing and you discover what it is you would ALWAYS do under any circumstances.  Are we working on the issues that people really care about?

3. Conversation is the way that humans have always thought together.  In conversation we discover shared meaning. It is the primal human organizing tool.  Even in the corridors of power, very little real action happens in debate, but rather in the side rooms, the hallways, the lunches, the times away from the ritual spaces of authority and in the the relaxed spaces of being human. In all of our design of meetings, engagement, planning or whatever, if you aren’t building conversation into the process, you will not benefit from the collective power and wisdom of humans thinking together.  These are not “soft” processes.  This is how wars get started and how wars end.  It’s how money is made, lives started, freedom realized. It is the core human organizing competency.

4. To change the conversation, change who is in the conversation. It is a really hard to see our own blind spots.  Even with a good intention to shift the conversation, without bringing in new perspectives, new lived experiences and new voices, our shift can become abstract.  If you are talking ABOUT youth with youth in the process, you are in the wrong conversation.  If you are talking about ending a war and you can’t contemplate sitting down with the enemy, you will not end the war, no matter how much your policy has shifted.  Once you shift the composition of the group, you can shift the status and power as well.  What if your became the mentors to adults?  What if clients directed our services?

5. Expect leadership to come from anywhere. If you expect leadership to come from the same places that it has always come from, you will likely get the same results you have always been getting.  That is fine to stabilize what is working, but in communities, leadership can come from anywhere.  Who is surprising you with their leadership?

6. Focus on what’s working, ask what’s possible, not what’s wrong. Energy for change in communities comes from working with what is working. When we accelerate and amplify what is working, we can apply those things to the issues in community that drain life and energy.  Not everything we have in immediately useful for every issue in a community, but hardly anything truly has to be invented.  Instead, find people who are doing things that are close to what you want to do and work with them and others to refine it and bring it to places that are needed.  Who is already changing the way services are provided?  Which youth organize naturally in community and how can we invite them to organize what is needed?  What gives us energy in our work?

7. Wisdom resides within us. I often start Open Space meetings by saying that “no angels will parachute in here to save us.  Rather, the angel is all of us together.”  Experts can’t do it, folks.  They can be helpful but the wisdom for implementation and acting is within us.  It has to be.

8. Everything is a failure in the middle, change occurs in cycles. We’re doing new things, and as we try them, many things will “fail.”  How do we act when that happens?  Are we tyrannized by the belief that everything we do has to move us forward?

9. Learning is the only way we become smarter about what we do. Duh.  But how many of us work in environments where we have to guard against failure?  Are you allowed to have a project or a meeting go sideways, or is the demand for accountability and effectiveness so overwhelming that we have to scale back expectations or lie about what we are doing.

10.  Meaningful work is a powerful human motivator. What is the deepest purpose that calls us to our work and how often do we remember this?

11. Humans can handle anything as long as we’re together. That doesn’t mean we can stop tsunamis, but it means that when we have tended to relationships, we can make it through what comes next.  Without relationships our communities die, individuals give up, and possibility evaporates.  The time for apologizing for relationship building is over.  We need each other, and we need to be with each other well.

12. Generosity, forgiveness and love.  These are the most important elements in a community. We need all of our energy to be devoted to our work.  If we use our energy to blame, resent or hate, then we deplete our capacity, we give away our power and our effectiveness.  This is NOT soft and cuddly work.  Adam Kahane has recently written about the complimentarity of love and power, and this principle, more than any other is the one that should draw our attention to that fact.  Love and power are connected.  One is not possible without the other.  Paying attention to this quality of being together is hard, and for many people it is frightening.  Many people won’t even have this conversation because the work of the heart makes us vulnerable.  But what do we really get for being guarded with one another, for hoarding, blaming and despising?

We could probably do a full three workshop on these principles (and in the circle just now we agreed to!).  But as key organizing principles, these are brilliant points of reflection for communities to engage in conversations about what is really going on.

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