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What it’s like to make change

May 2, 2011 By BC, Collaboration, Community, Emergence, First Nations, Leadership 6 Comments

Just off a call where we were discussing what it takes to shift paradigms in indigenous social development. We noted that we hear a lot from people that they are busy and challenged and they need clear paths forward otherwise they are wasting their time.

I have a response to that.

We don’t know what we are doing.  Everything we have been doing so far has resulted in what we have now.  The work of social change – paradigm shifting social innovation – is not easy, clear or efficient.  If you are up for it you will confront some of the the following, all of the time:

  • Confusion about what we are doing.
  • A temptation to blame others for where we are at.
  • Conflict with people that tell you you are wasting their time.
  • A feeling of being lost, overwhelmed or hopeless.
  • Fear that if you try something and it fails, you will be fired, excluded or removed.
  • Demands for accountability and reprimands if things don’t work out.
  • Worry that you are wasting your time and that things are not going according to plan.
  • A reluctance to pour yourself into something in case it fails.
  • A reticence to look at behaviours that are holding you back.

Social change is not easy.  Asking for it to be made easy is not fair.  Leadership in this field needs to be able to host all of these emotional states, and to help people hold each other through very trying times.  It is about  resilience, the kind that is needed both when things fall apart AND when things take too long to come back together.

Everyone needs to be a leader here, everyone needs to recognize these states in themselves and hold others in compassion when they see them arising in others.  Working with the emergent unknown requires pacing, a big heart, and a stout challenge.  To create the experiments that help us forward we need to be gentle with judgment, but fiercely committed to harvesting and learning.  We need to cultivate nuance, discernment, advocacy and inquiry rather than jumping to conclusions and demanding rational analytical responses to every situation.

You up for that?

A glorious season drawing to a close

May 1, 2011 By Uncategorized No Comments

Yesterday my childhood football team Tottenham Hotspur saw it’s magnificent 2010-2011 campaign begin a slow limp to a disappointing ending.  This was an incredible year for the team, making the UEFA Champions League at the close of last season, narrowly qualifying for the group stage, going on an incredible run to finish top of the group and then knocking off AC Milan to get to the Quarter Final, one stage further than our fierce rivals, Arsenal.   Along the way we have had some great victories and matches, including some incredible league derby games against Arsenal, and some scintillating attacking football from PFA Player of the year, Gareth Bale. Injuries, mistakes, an arid strike corps and a late, fatal dip in form have meant that the Champions League is all but out of reach for us for next season.  Yesterday’s travesty at Chelsea, a game which the Blues won 2-1 on goals that were not goals at all (the ball HAS to cross the line, players HAVE to be onside in order for a goal to count, technically speaking) has sealed our fate.  I was feeling a little melancholy about it this morning when I came across this lovely animation of Gareth Bale’s performances against Inter Milan this year, a true coming of age for a great footballer.  Bale is a lovely young man, soft spoken, competitive and incredibly blessed with speed, stability and a superb talent for crossing the ball with his left foot.  When he scores he makes a little heart with his fingers and runs straight to the fans.

He has been the best part of what has been, to be fair, a really fun season to follow, perhaps more fun even than the 1981 FA Cup year, when Hoddle, Ardilles and Villa thrilled my 12 year old heart.  The old refrain now sounds…always next year.

The week’s tweets

May 1, 2011 By Notes No Comments

A new song in an old vein

April 29, 2011 By Community, Music, Poetry One Comment

As a traditional musician schooled primarily in the Celtic tradition, I am fond of traditional themes and devices for communicating messages.  On our home island right now there is a sometimes fierce debate occurring about the future of the Crown lands, that involves the possibility of creating a national park.  Today I was thinking about the complexities of the debate, and how it has seemed to me that those leading the opposition to the park are speaking on the one hand out of a concern for protecting something dear about our Island, but it has felt a little off to me.  Like a father who won’t let his daughter grow up.   That, it turns out is a a very old story, and so I made a little song today about our place, telling a little story that captures I think how I feel about the park, and the partnerships that we would enter into to make it possible.

the short answer is that, given everything, the option of establishing a national park on Bowen excites me.  While I have been carefully weighing the pros and cons, and while I could happily live with either option, I am increasingly finding many of the articulated reasons for voting no to such a future to be riddled with pessimism, fear and clingy attachment.  For me, a park offers Bowen a chance to be creative, interesting, beautiful and innovative in the way we move forward in the future.  And so, here is the song:

 

Come gather round you islanders, a story I will tell

About a gorgeous maiden within whose midst we dwell

Whose beauty and whose presence was coveted as well

By her negative and ever doting father.

 

“I raised you from a baby,” he was wont to say.

“I saved you when an evil man came to steal you away,

I preserved the beauty that is yours for you to wear today

And I’d do the same again in an instant.”

 

Now the maiden had her suitors, who came from far and near

And every one her father met left her home with fear.

They sought her hand in marriage but left her place in tears

And her father only ever issued no.

 

One day as she sat watching the latest suitor leave.

Her heart began to fail and her breath began to heave

She felt herself imprisoned and she began to grieve

For the fading of the promise of her beauty.

 

She went to search the country for a partner for her life

A stable man who loved her, and who would take her for his wife

Who would stay beside her through the victories and strife.

And she found him and she brought him back to father.

 

With deep suspicion in his heart he looked him up and down

He accused him of an evil plot to usurp his crown

He met the maiden’s one true love with a stony frown

And he issued forth a stern and solid no.

 

Now the maiden didn’t stand for this and she looked him in the eye.

Said she “it’s time you stood aside and hold your strident cries

This suitor will be with me long after you have died.

And I know I’ll finally come to life beside him.”

 

Her father had no answer for this surprising turn

He showed so little interest in what she’d come to learn

His anger boiled over and he became more stern

And demand that she prove to him she loved him.

 

She sat down by her father and took him by the hand

She broke it to him gently so he would understand

His overbearing attitude and selfish reprimands

No longer had a claim upon her choices

 

For if the maiden were to stay within her father’s range

Her future would be grim indeed for as the world changed

She would stay forever in her father’s gilded cage

And her life would wither down to nothing.

 

Islanders you’ve strongly heard the tales others tell

You’ve seen the paranoia of the coming living hell

But surely you must know that a maiden can live well

If her partner helps her build a life of beauty.

 

Citizens as owners

April 26, 2011 By BC, Community 4 Comments

Last week I was in a number of conversations about the role of governments and their relationships to citizens.  I heard a common metaphor in these conversations, one which sounded familiar to me from my days working in the federal public service: people were speaking of citizens as customers.

In their desire to provide good services and meet community needs, governments often consider citizens as customers.  Big consulting firms, perhaps re-purposing their commercial processes, sell this idea.  Conservative commentators and those who import business ideas into the realm of public administration are enamoured by the simplicity of the metaphor. The problem is not only that it’s not true, but it’s also the wrong metaphor.

For starters, citizens are citizens and not customers.  The art of governance is not the same as leadership in a business setting.  Communities are not strategic entities with goals and mission statements – what is the the strategic objective of your neighbourhood?  So much community planning confuses processes and measures aimed at organizational efficiency and applies them to community building.  The purposes are different.  The purpose of community is belonging, happiness, a sense of security, wellbeing, resiliance.  Communities are not efficient, they are not a good use of resources, they do not exhibit directionality.  People who live in communities rarely think of themselves living in a strategic entity, but they often think of applying strategic planning to other people’s communities.

Citizens are not customers.  They are citizens.  And as such they are entirely responsible for the community they create or choose not to create.

But if you do insist on using a metaphor from the commercial world, then try changing the conversation from citizens as customers to citizens as owners.  What if citizens were considered the owners of their community and their governments?  What if it was their role to create plans and ideas about their future and to invite development, amenities and services to meet those needs?  If you are an elected official or a community planner or a developer, how would things change if you approached citizens as the ownership group of the enterprise you are involved in?  Citizens are owners in the fiscal sense, the property sense and also owners of their future.  This is not about just owning land and paying taxes, this is about the commitment of time and energy you invest in a great community.  That makes you an owner and gives you a responsibility for the future.  It is up to governments NOT to rob communities of this responsibility, but help enable them to exercise it.

Peter Block’s six conversations and his reframing of community are immensely important in this respect. As are many of the tools you can find at the Orton Foundation’s website which looks at the role of heart and soul in community planning and sees citizens as owners.  These are not “soft” tools or touchy-feely processes: rather they are powerful ways to engage with communities and citizens to create  the kinds of resilience that sustains communities through good times and bad, and that makes development possible and relevant.