I have great clients. Most of the people who end up working with me do so because they want to work in radically more participatory ways, opening up processes to more voices, more leadership. In conference settings this means scheduling much more dialogue or running the whole thing using Open Space Technology and dispensing with pre-loading content.
But there persists, especially in the corporate and government sectors, a underlying nervousness in doing this. common objections to making things more participatory include:
- It’s too risky
- We’re not ready for it
- I’m worried it won’t work
- There won’t be enough structure
- People need content
- We need to know what the outcomes will be.
It is worth exploring these issues in a compassionate and direct manner. What these issues are really about are trust and control and a sense that the responsibility for the experience lies with the organizers and not the participants.
This is not always the easiest thing to say to people, especially those that have hired you to deliver a conference or a conversation. But it is important to confront these issues face on, because no matter how well you run a participatory process, without confronting the edges of control and trust, you are going to get anywhere ultimately.
These setiments originate in a couple of assumptions that are worth challenging:
- The responsibility for the experience rests with the organizers, not the participants. This is to some extent true although it does a great disservice to most conference design. Assuming that you as a planning committee have to deliver a great experience for everyone is neither possible nor productive. You are never going to make everyone happy, so leave that idea behind. And you aren’t going to get all the content right. The best traditional conferences meet some of the expectations of participants most of the time, meaning that there are large blocks of time that don’t meet people’s expectations. And so the default setting for most participants is to spend thousands of dollars on a passive experience, taking some interest in workshops or speeches and spending the rest of the time self-organizing dinners, coffee breaks and other chances to connect with friends old and new. Another word for a conference that takes thousands of your dollars and leaves you finding your own way is “a racket.”
- People need content and structure. Of course we do, but not in the way most conference organizers deliver it. On the content side, most conference planning consists of spending a year guessing what people want to learn about, or worse, putting out RFPs for workshops, which results in conferences becoming big commercials for people’s pet processes, or ideas, without any consideration for what folks want to learn. The conference is then marketed on the backs of these offerings. That isn’t to say that there can’t be value, but it does constrain learning. Similarly, with structure, conference organizers will often say to me that things like Open Space don’t have enough structure. Open Space has plenty of structure, but it is free of content until the gathering itself populates the agenda with the questions that are top of mind. I have worked at countless conferences where “structure” is everything. And what this typically means is that the conference runs behind schedule and people are herded here and there, shortshrifting almost every aspect of their experience, to the point where folks just plain don’t return from coffee breaks.
- People learn by passive listening. There is no question that a stirring keynote or a dynamic and powerful presentation can have the effect of galvanizing ideas and making people hungry for learning. But too often the passive experience of listing to experts is built into conferences such that a key note is followed by a panel, is followed by lecture-workshops, is followed by another keynote and so on. Participation is minimal.
What I have discovered over the years is that people want to be in a conference setting that has a variety of experience. If there is a keynote, it is important to have that person act more as a provocateur, to set up questions that folks can dialogue around rather than proclaiming the truth from on high. Also building a conference in part or in whole around Open Space means that people can bring their own questions and expertise to the gathering, create a marketplace to exchange ideas and perhaps even create new ways of being together. I don’t think every conference needs to end in “action,” but I do think that many conferences could build in more explicit opportunities to start something.
the bottom line for people in understanding that giving up control is important. A conference planning committee should focus on building a container into which participants can pour their ideas. Creative, engaging, participatory conferences and gatherings have substantial participation undertaken by the participants themselves. They look at how passive a conference is and break open opportunities for people to connect, to go on a learning journey together, to create something new, or simply to sit in good conversation with each other catching up and sharing their work.
Trust your participants and invite them well. Invite them to come prepared to make contributions. Put responsibility for their experience solidly in their laps. Let them know that if they are taking to time and money to come to the gathering, they should also take the chance to create and contribute content to the gathering. Bring your questions, bring your stories, look for others and see what you can create. Challenge participants to show up to a co-creative gathering rich in conversations, connections and inspiration. Invite them, provide a good container with tools for them to do their work, and turn it over to them.
Fearless conference planning, accompanied by excellent invitation and skilful hosting for productive self-organization and emergence creates memorable experiences.
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.
Just dipping into Google+ a little more today. I’ve set up a few circles of friends, family and various professional and local communities of practice. Today I went a step further and set up a circle of “conspirators.” I intend to use this circle for posting process and facilitation design questions for clients and challenges I am currently working with and I invite you to do the same. One of the ways the social web has changed my business practice is that I rarely design projects without checking in with friends first. Usually I do this based on who is on Skype at the moment, but I am going to take the opportunity of a new social network to see if I can’t change the way I do design.
Analyse this...!
Yesterday I had a chance to grab lunch with Dave Pollard in our local coffee shop on Bowen Island. One of the things we talked about was the supremacy of analysis in the world and why that is a problem when it comes to operating in complex domains.
I have been intentionally working a lot lately with Dave Snowdon et. al.’s Cynefin framework to support decision making in various domains. It is immensely helpful in making sense of the messy reality of context and exercises like anecdote circles and butterfly stamping are very powerful, portable and low tech processes.
Cynefin is also useful in that it warns us against a number of fatal category errors people make when trying to design solutions to problems. The most serious of these is remaining complacent in a simple context which has the effect of tipping the system to chaos. Nearly as infuriating and problematic to me is the applicability of analysis to complex domains.
Analysis has a dominant place in organizational and community life. It provides a sense of security that we can figure things out and operate in the space of the known. If we just analyse a situation enough we can identify all if the aspects if the problem and choose a solution. Of course in the complicated domain, where causes and effects can be known even though they are separated in time and space, analysis works beautifully. But in complex domains, characterized by emerged phenomenon, analysis tends to externalize and ignore that which it cannot account for with the result that solutions often remain dangerously blind to surprise and “black swan” events.
The Cyenfin framework advocates working with stories and social constructed meaning to sense and act in complex spaces. Where as analysis relies on objective data and meaning making models to create rules and tools, action in complex spaces uses stories and patterns to create principles and practices which help us to create small actions – probes in the system – that work in a nuanced way with emergence.
In this respect culture matters. The stories that are told and the practices thy are used to make sense of those stories is the method for acting in complex space. This distinction us helpful for me working with indigenous communities where program management may rely on analytical tools (and culture is stamped out in the process) but practices need to be grounded in culturally based responses. Using stories and social meaning making restores culture to its traditional role of helping groups of humans move together in complex domains while using analysis more appropriately.
In a recent email thread between Bob Stilger and a bunch of us friends and colleagues about how to support community rebuilding in Japan, Nancy Margulies shared this story of working in post-Katrina New Orleans with a series of World Cafes:
I hosted a number of World Cafés in New Orleans. The participants were a mix of people who had been directly impacted by the flood and those who had less or no material loss. We used the time for people to exchange their stories, share their feelings and listen to one another. This story-telling seemed to be so necessary that we didn’t attempt more initially. However, during the last round I asked the question, “What can community be for you at a time like this?” or a similar question. My co-hosts for these events were churches and local non-profits.
After a few months I offered “Cafés of Hope”. In those events we provided a sheet of paper that is placemat sized in front of each participant. I asked them to draw a symbol that represents hope for the future and then with lines radiating from the center write down key words or images to convey examples of what gives them hope. We did this in silence. Then people shared at their tables and as they listened if they heard something that they agreed was hopeful they added it to their “Map of Hope”.
As people moved to new tables they took their maps with them and build upon them as they heard more stories of hope. One variation I used was to ask each table to leave behind a few words or images that represent hope (by drawing/writing on another sheet of paper that was in the center of the table). This remained with one person who shared its meaning with the 3 new people who joined the conversation at that table.
At the end of the Cafe we harvested the ideas and each person was encouraged to take their map of hope home and share it with someone else, post it and add to it as more moments of hope came to mind.
After the initial work of providing immediate aid and safety for people, in disasters there is the need to rebuild community. It might not be an immediate need but it is an important one. Relationships are critical to rebuilding. A few years ago, speaking with a colleague that works in refugee camps in sub-Saharan Africa, I learned that most people, when they first arrive in a camp fleeing violence, malnutrition or worse, ask first about their families and friends. If they are able to connect to people quickly in the camp their chance at survival increases. Community resilience is built on those connection of the heart.
Nancy’s cafe design provides a brilliant and quick way to begin this process.