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.
Behaviour change is not the same as culture change.
That is all.
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.
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.